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Actionable ideas for the Vancouver World Urban Forum From David Tebbutt:
This is the promise: “The Habitat JAM will gather your input and add it to thousands of others to identify actionable ideas for the Vancouver World Urban Forum agenda and influence the Forum’s content. It will start conversations and build new networks that bring enormous potential to global problem solving.”
It sounds more like a threat to me. At best, manipulated bullshit. Problem solving is a fine thing, but the fewer conversations and networks devoted to “global” problem solving, the better, I would say. This is, I think, because “global” bundles together lots of difficulties into one huge impossibility, which you then blame on global capitalism. But the way to actually solve problems is to do what actual capitalists actually do, which is break the problems up into solluble particles.
Still, “actionable” means that someone will at least be able to sue these people, yes? No. Non-responsibility for resulting chaos is of the essence of gatherings like this.
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Perhaps too subtly, I made this point in the original post about IBM’s involvement in the information gathering and analysis: “If it can provably make sense of the outpourings of the JAM”.
Please note the ‘If’ and ‘provably’.
Every word is meaningless ersatz corporate speak/self-justifying, content-free committee speak.
Frankly, I can’t think of a single global problem I would let people of this calibre near. Actually, I can’t think of a single global problem, to tell you the truth.
Verity:
and the corollary to your skepticism about global problems is that there are also NO GLOBAL SOLUTIONS. Only acceptable trade-offs.
Richard Easbey – I do not accept there there are any global problems – other than a lack of universal free trade – and therefore there are no global “solutions” or “trade-offs” are required.
fair enough.
Following the links, I discover that a JAM (no clue why caps) is ….
This is no simple chatroom! The JAM technology uses standard Web browsers, where registered users post comments in the forums, respond, create dialogue, and interact with others around the world.
How does it differ from the boards, forums, blogs, communities, usw, taking up half the web with their earnest inward-looking discussions (including this one)? Dunno.
Forgive me for being cynical, but I suspect that IBM is gathering together a bunch of technologies and giving them a name so that it can sell shedloads to idiots who feel safer trusting computers than their own judgement.
Professor Ian Angell at LSE (is he still there?) calls these people ‘methodolics’. And there are lots of them. All willing to put their hands in their employers’ pockets.
Why is it some of the most beautiful cities in the world (Paris; Vienna; Rome; Vancouver; Seattle etc..) are invariably uglied-up conference-going arse-heads like this?
Why can’t they bugger off to some far-off unbearable battle-of-harships place more suitable to their creed like Siberia, the Gobi Desert, or Aberystwyth?
What a bunch of pompous, ignorant, and self-congratulating losers you all are. If you had the half-wittedness to actually look up the JAM, for which I have been invited as an expert contributor, you will see that it is a UN initiative, and IBM has little to do with it other than riding the publicity and experimenting with set-up to improve its commercial tools (something you lot should be in favour of no? you’re all about big business getting its rocks off, no?).
The good thing about it is that it gives people, like you you – yes you, the losers who can’t ever actually get accredited to UN meetings, and who just whinge on websites – a chance to say what you actually think about such things. Shame you won’t bother logging on therefore. Also, it’s good in that it is one step away from the even worse mega-meetings in person. Admittedly there is a UN meeting taking place IRL, but that is to some extent less important than the online dialogue, at least in terms of the trend (away from pointless chatfests).
The problem with the thing is the UN setting: no matter how much public consultation is taking place, will governments implement any recommendations? I doubt it. Even if UN-HABITAT is keen to listen in, which I doubt, it might well turn out like the World Bank ‘globalisation’ dialogues in about 2000 (thousands of critical messages; zero shift in policy by the WB).
And the quality of the experts. How much can they really help so many thousands of people around the world, or even respond to them?
But it’s something. Not least, it is a chance for thousands of people in the “battle-of-hardships” places to have some voice heard, or at least think that they are, and thereby get a taste for it, and exercise that muscle of ‘right of participation’.
You guys? What are you? Total zeros in this equation.
I came to this site, innocently, looking for intelligence! It’s sites like this that should be shut down, not JAMs for all their failings.
Ahh, the U.N spnsorship does explain a lot…
“You guys? What are you? Total zeros in this equation.”
I cannot speak for the rest, but for myself, I am proud to be a zero contributor by thought or deed to the intellectual black hole of sleaze, corruption and moral self-righteous of the UN.
There are no global problems; only busybody global solutions.
I don’t know who you are, John, but *you’re* the one who should be checking his facts.
“The first IBM JAM was held in 2001 and involved all the company’s employees contributing to a structured discussion on the future of the company, what worked and what didn’t, what the company should do in the future and so on.”
Look it up.
John
Well, now that I know that it’s a UN event I am now absolutely certain that it’s a bunch of cr*p.
It will end up just like all the other UN conferences on this, that and the other thing; several thousand people who can’t actually do anything blaming the people who actually do. And since the conclusion is going to be that it’s all the American’s fault anyway why don’t you just save all the jet fuel and issue the condemnation to start with.
Because they wouldn’t feel important and lofty enough if they couldn’t issue their warnings and condemnations from overseas venues. These are guys who travel to condemn!
Ah, the UN.
Of course.
Aren’t they the guys who set up the anti racism conference in South Africa? You know, the one which was nothing but a vicious and bigoted hatefest against the US, Israel and the JOOOS.
Thanks for comments on my comment.
First: Why, if the JAM is so sh*te, is Dave T plugging it on his site. He can claim his original post swings both ways on the potential value of the event…but his positivity about its potential seems evident in putting a big logo link to it on the same page!
Second: Yes, the JAM is IBM-powered, but the content is all provided by contractees, and volunteer experts, to UN-HABITAT; and the output is more grist for the World Urban Forum in Vancouver next year. IBM is just getting reflected cred, and alpha-testing of some jazzed-up online conferencing stuff.
Third: The people posting here show a stupendously low level of knowledge of how the UN is structured, how it works, how it could benefit libertarian thinking, and how it relates to capitalism. Shocking, and hugely self-defeating. I came here for intelligence, being a free-thinker myself, and get semi-conscious ranting.
a. To slash away at the whole ‘UN’ as sleazy and whatever is really dumb. It just is. The idea that the anti-racism forum whatever is anything to do with the oil-for-food scandal whatever is anything to do with Rwanda and on and on is nonsese. These parts of the UN are about as united, both practically and institutionally, as a town council in a Utah backwater and the White House. Don’t you guys actually know anything about the UN? You won’t, in fact, find harsher critics of its failings than former UN hacks, e.g. me; but at least we know where to aim. Start by learning that the six principal organs are all rather separate. And then, realise that the agencies are separate from the organs. And then, realise that the agencies all have different mandates. And then, be my guest, go to town with the criticism: you will be mosquitoes in nudist colony, but will all least see some things aren’t for biting.
And if you say, a pox on them all, you are again just dumb. WHO, for example, doesn’t give too much of a monkey’s whether it works with govs or private sector: it just wants to get TB shots or polio vaccine or generic antiretrovirals into the field. Now if you are against that, it’s straight up and down: whatever your supposed politics, you are ‘objectively in favour of genocide’ (to paraphrase Orwell). Go on, swallow that pride for a moment.
b. One thing I think you might like to ponder in attacking the UN is the role of the Universal Declaration. This is a strikingly liberal document, with a high degree of ‘rights’ in principle accorded the person and the family. This is not so many light-years away from a libertarian platform. One thing that you might consider is, if libertarianism suddenly – a la avian flu – went pandemic, what kind of global document would be created to establish and enshrine the rights of the indvidual? You guessed you clever-clogs: something like the UD. UN as bogeyman? How about UN as template for libertarian ascendancy?
c. While the UN is indeed a state-centric entity, with borrowed sovereignty from state entitites, the UN is not at all anti-capital. Pretty much every item of rhetoric is geared towards liberation of the marketplace. Remember, too that the WTO has preeminence in prestige, and thus UN diktats are routinely checked for compatibility with the WTO (which presumably you kids are in favour of, broadly speaking, right?). While the UN’s brand of capitalism is perhaps far too lilly-livered for your tastes, you might at least be correct about the essential ideology; and indeed, realise the extent to which the UN stock ideology can easily be further directed to a more stronger capital-centric approach.
Fourth: Yes, the JAM is going to be pointless in terms of global governance, because yes much of the global governance structures are cr*p and couldn’t use the input from such a consultation/dialogue even if they wanted to. But it may have another function, of getting people chatting online; particularly those who want to express their rights (including libertarian rights to be free from governments, and even the UN, if they don’t know any better). More effective than this wretched backwater anyway! Just remind why you would be against that? Or ask Dave T, who seems cautiously in favour (see above).
Fifth: And just to show that you people REALLY don’t think before engaging auto-whinge, this JAM requires no flying at all! It’s all online, doh! The World Urban Forum will take place whatever, but the JAM may well reduce the numbers of people flying in, because they will have put their penn’orth’s in online via the JAM.
You really are pretty ace caricature of self-validating whingers. You’re not even advancing the libertarian cause! Carry on! You make the UN look earnestly utopian!
John, sweetie, can I debut this post with a little ‘point of order’? You write: … yes much of the global governance structures are cr*p . No offence, but around here, we do not use asterisk language. We say crap, fuck, bullshit, whatever. If you are posting on this site, you should be sensitive enough to our language to be aware of this.
I naturally didn’t read through the thicket of your post, not being a committee person myself, but I did see the initials WHO.
It is vital that the WHO be disbanded because it is a waste of the money of taxpayers (working people; private sector) all over the world. They’ve accomplished nothing that the private sector could not have accomplised cheaper and faster, with 88% fewer 4-wheel drives, fewer junket first class air tickets, fewer junket 5-star hotel rooms and blah-de-blah-ha.
The WHO is destructive and has led people in some African countries into a vile state of dependency. It’s a nasty piece of work. Get rid of it. The world will be healthier for it.
John,
You are correct in many of the points you make here, but no more so than we are. This is a small site and many come here to have their own biases reinforced, rather than challenged.
However, the people here do tend to be both highly intelligent and informed, and on occasion the conversation is both lively and witty; although there is a major bias against state and supra state action. And the reason for that? Well –
“You make the UN look earnestly utopian!”
and that is the whole point really.
The 20th Century has taught those here that ,in general, the more utopian the ideology or the structure so the more corrupt, vicious, bloodthirsty and genocidal the results.
God save us from utopians.
Thanks Verity. While I do read posts in detail – seems on respectful – I don’t read site tech specs much, so I tend to assume that automatic cr*p/crap catchters are in place.
Given that you now say you aren’t even reading my post, I think it’s safe to surmise this site really is as anti-thought, anti-fact as I intuited, and is really just a mutual love-in with no content of any identifiable sort. So, go for it! Any time you actually want to debate the means to achieve libertarianism, however, think again.
Trouble is Chris – and thanks for your comment – that in ‘making the UN look earnestly utopian’ (I think you missed the irony, but the point is still valid), you do so in a way that makes yourselves lack credibility. In much the same way – perhaps precisely – that you chide those who are anti-US, and dismiss them on the mere grounds that their attack is sheer knee-jerk prejudice and ignorance…check out your own identikit attacks on the so-called ‘UN’.
To Verity, since I can’t in fact resist the op to come back on the substantive point: if you think that the private sector is going to a) produce low-cost antiretrovirals, b) indeed produce a whole range of drugs for disease specific to the global poor, c) is going to deliver such medicines, even if they should ever make them at prices that are both profitable and affordable, in the field of Africa/Asia/Latin America…I think you may need to review your understanding of the private sector. If you, as any sensible person has (including those in favour of truly free markets), otherwise conclude that the private sector will never willingly waste its money on drugs that will never turn a profit, still less deliver such medicines to the poor in situ; you may like to come out in addition as, as I say, ‘objective in favour of genocide’.
The private sector will not willingly, voluntarily stem the HIV/AIDS pandemic. By all means criticise Africans for getting themselves infected in the first place. But when all is said and all is done, perhaps you – and your colleagues – can clarify: do we let hundreds of millions of people just die; when drugs can be made and distributed and administered that will given them life? The. Private. Sector. Will. Not.Do. This. (Fullstop, in case you need an extra one.)
Just for a second, drop the ideological comfort blanket. Think about what is required to save hundreds of millions of lives now, from preventable disease. Whatever you come up with…will look a lot like the WHO. (Who is working with the private sector naturally anyway, to the private sector’s general satisfaction.)
John,
You are quite right. In terms of what you are talking about the private sector could never deal with the health and medical effects of African poverty on the scale you are talking about, no private organisation has either the resources or the level of altruism required. Nor would I be happy about the existence of such a powerful organisation if one did. However, this begs the question of why that poverty still exists.
Fifty years ago South and East Asia was as poor as Africa. In fact, British East Africa was quite wealthy compared to Malaya and the rest. Now? Africa is poverty stricken and Asia is joining the first world in terms of purchasing power.
What happenned? Government, thats what. The state, regulation. If it takes twenty permits and two hundred days to set up a small business in one country and a day and a half and no permits to set one up somewhere else which will demonstrate the greater level of enterpreneurship? Which will create the wealth? When a people are wealthy they don’t NEED food relief, and, despite the health professionals propaganda, nor do they need state provision of the most utterly basic health care. They can, and do, take care of all this themselves.
Sorry, but the UN and government famine/medical releif are only necessary because of the influence which these organisations exert in the first place.
Private action will deal with these problems by ensuring that their root cause, poverty, ceases to be a significant problem.
I know I am over simplifying here, but space is limited.
As my comment was perhaps the most objectionable to John, I think I’ll venture another one.
‘Objectively in favour of genocide’ we are not. Genocide is something you do to a people, not something that happens to a people because of something you didn’t do (supply drugs).
Your insistence on ‘thinking about what is actually required to solve the problem’ is merely a sleight of hand to bypass the libertarian argument Chris Harper makes without really considering the harsh implications that follow from it. So who exactly is clinging to his ideological comfort blanket?
John writes, that if I think the free market : “… c) is going to deliver such medicines, even if they should ever make them at prices that are both profitable and affordable, in the field of Africa/Asia/Latin America…I think you may need to review your understanding of the private sector. If you, as any sensible person has (including those in favour of truly free markets), otherwise conclude that the private sector will never willingly waste its money on drugs that will never turn a profit, still less deliver such medicines to the poor in situ; you may like to come out in addition as, as I say, ‘objective in favour of genocide’.”
No, John, no company charged with a duty to turn a profit for its shareholders will do the above. You are missing my point, which is: So what?
They can either buy the drugs at the going market rate, if they care so much about their people, with some of the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid they have received over the last decade, or do without. This is a problem for the countries involved to sort out. One thing they could do is get rid of the multi-billionaire dictators they so supinely allow to rule them with a rod of iron.
I said above, and you apparently missed it: there are no global problems (except totally free trade). This is a problem for the countries involved. These people are adult human beings. Let them find their own solutions, which would mean clearing the decks of dictators.
You add: “you may like to come out in addition as, as I say, ‘objective in favour of genocide'” This is a highly offensive, as well as being highly adolescent, remark and I would hope it would earn you a reprimand from one of the editors. There is a fatwah against ad hominens on this blog.
Yes, I think to call someone ‘in favour of genocide’ is far more offensive than to call them a mere fuckwit, arse-head or – worst of all! – right wing (adolescent though such terms may be).
mike, and anyone who is at all familiar with Samizdata (and why would you be posting unless you knew who your readers are?), knows we are pretty upbeat about the human race and believe in independence, self-help and the power of the motivated individual to create wealth. Most of us here seem to believe that the Africans are just as entrepreneurial, and just as capable of creating wealth, as anyone else and that we are disallowing them a fair go with trade restrictions.
The problem with Africa, John and other short-sighted tranzis, is not pharmaceuticals or food, but the endless dependency cycle caused by their dictators. But we’re not busybodies. Their dictators are up to them to deal with, but it is not our role to make life more bearable under those dictators.
Hello again. Firstly, apologies for the typo in my last post – ‘objective’ should have read ‘objectively’.
The reference was to Orwell, and I defer the polemicism of the remark, and its justification, to him: he suggested that those who were anti-war were ‘objectively pro-fascist’.
There is a problematic counterfactual/hypothetical required to decide this point; but let me say again, you really don’t understand the dynamics of the private sector if think they will produce low-cost drugs for the poor, and not just sell them but distribute them in the worst-affected of these countries. Any company in the world can think of a ‘profit-making’ activity; the choice tends however towards spending resources on what is most profitable. Manufacturing and distributing pro-poor drugs, e.g. antiretrovirals in Africa, does not fit that bill. Just what school of economics are you espousing if you think, shorn of any other considerations, phama corps will make money this way? Do you have any evidence? (Because there’s lots to the contrary, including e.g. the fact, er, that companies just don’t do it.)
Verity says: They can either buy the drugs at the going market rate, if they care so much about their people, with some of the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid they have received over the last decade, or do without. This is a problem for the countries involved to sort out. One thing they could do is get rid of the multi-billionaire dictators they so supinely allow to rule them with a rod of iron.
Assuming that this cash has indeed been misspent, you are indeed saying that they ‘can do without’. Which means, I reiterate, that you are ‘objectively in favour of genocide’. You really won’t face it up, will you? You dismissively throw half the world not a bone of succour, but a pamphlet of haughty ideology, and say ‘eat’.
When you say ‘they’ in this para, is there not (at least in the first use of ‘they’) an irony in referring to state in this way, as some kind of active force? I though you preferred bypassing state action. In any case, what about in the instances where the ‘state’ has truly failed, imploded, collapsed? Who is to do what, in that instance?
When you shift the referent of the ‘they’ to the people – suggesting they merely ‘throw off’ dictators, you make it sound so easy! Perhaps you can share your experience in ‘throwing off’ the bonds of the comparatively undictatorial (compared to e.g. Mugabe) government in your country (presumably U.S., or Europe)? I’m sure that the breakthroughs the libertarian movement will be a beacon for all such peoples suffering dictatorship!
Or. Maybe. Not. You know full well it’s cheap shot to call the poorest people in the world, still crippled by the aftershock of colonialism, foisted with ‘dicatators’ that are often kept in place by foreign governments to whom the dicator is a convenient client…’supine’. Would you consider yourself ‘supine’ for not having installed a libertarian order just yet?
This is all so rank. You are attempting, with some petulant shrug, to offload the responsibility to give some coherent answer to what you do about serious, preventable examples of global suffering. When you incant the power of the private sector, and the power of the individual over government tyranny, you resolutely refuse to observe that in the instances I am alluding to, e.g. HIV in many African countries, these panacaeas are going to be ineffective at least without some initial platform establishment, which currrently doesn’t exist. Perhaps states, societies, peoples, whatever, are like extremely fat people: once they have fallen over, whether through their own fault or not, they need help to be righted. The question is will you offer it, if you have reason to believe that in many instances at least the people (as separate from their dictators) have not abused goodwill so far offered.
It seems you won’t and you will retreat behind your curtain of pro-market anti-state ideology. Perhaps this is because to propose a pragmatic solution that would work, however much it might represent an ideological fudge, would require proposing something a bit like the UN.
I repeat, therefore, that I believe that your position of refusing to look realistically at the problem makes you ‘objectively pro-genocide’. (NOTE to all casual readers: this is not an ‘
‘adolescent’ jibe – I do not believe that Verity or others of you are ‘subjectively’ pro-genocide, just that your stated position here works out pro-genocde objectively.) And whether ‘genocide’ is necessarily a crime of commission, or through inaction in the face of an advancing disease pandemic, can be crime of omission, I will leave moot.
The essential point appears to be that you present such a lame, untextured argument for libertarianism that it must be disposed as a quasi-or crypto-hate strategy. Certainly, if a Zimbabwean was to hear you toss out the idea they should just ‘get rid’ of Mugabe as some kind of way of solving their various problems, or just wait for a dollar-signs-in-their-eyes private sector to whizz up with antiretrovirals for cheap…they would just read you as saying that you hated them. Simple as that.
By all means incant the catechism of libertarianism as you see: market-market-market, no-govs no-govs no-govs. But if you look at your own purported platform from a different view, that of essential rights which must be protected not by governments but by a great increase in personal responsibility of each agent (including an agreement to help where possible), you are abysmally falling short of your own aims.
Chris Harper: I think your point is clear and valid, and definitely arguable. I think however there are differences between Africa and Asia (perhaps, to show where I am not coming from, even including willingness to get up and work and solve problems), but these include the ruthlessness with which the West/North has kept post-colonial control, and indeed the extent to which colonial control existed. The UN’s role, however, is always very weak: the UN is not anything approaching global government (no part of it has any fixed sovereign-reducing mandate, except the Security Council…certainly not WHO!). If you want incipient global government, check out the WTO (presumably your darling, guys?)!
And finally: “a fatwah on ad hominems”. Christ on a bike. You couldn’t make that stuff up.
John – I would contact a Samizdata editor regarding your incontinent use of language, but I’ll just take you on myself instead, as you’re so easy.
Writing that someone is effectively promoting genocide is is not an argument. It’s a silly juvenile insult dressed up in a lot of important-sounding Latinate words.
Africa’s still suffering from the shock of colonialism? On which planet? Every African country was immeasurably better off under colonialism. If they are still reeling in shock, 50 years after we’ve gone, then perhaps the fault is theirs.
To reiterate: Africa will have to solve its own problems. People living on charity become dependent, which is what has happened to many African countries. An entire continent of welfare clients is a depressing notion. I would rather see a climate of wealth-creation and real, not nominal, independence, and this cannot be dictated by governments or tranzi organisations. People have to do this for themselves.
Finally, with reference to: “a fatwah on ad hominems”. Christ on a bike. You couldn’t make that stuff up.:
If you don’t like the rules around here, I suggest you buy your own bandwidth to regurgitate your stale, dense, oft-argued tranzi stream of drivel. Anyone who doesn’t like the rules is free to contact the site’s editors at reply@samizdata.net and excoriate them.
Verity: I think you really don’t understand what an ‘ad hominem’ attack is. To call you ‘objectively pro-genocide’, making a clear and unhysterical case, distinguishing that from ‘subjectively pro-genocide’ (which even though I know nothing of you, I can see that you are not), and citing the polemical historical reference (i.e. Orwell)…is not ad hom. It may be offensive, you may think it unreasonable; but please do at least observer the extent to which I am actually trying to argue a case and not attacking you or merely attempting to trivalise, rather than unpick, your approach. It very definitely is an argument, and if you need it spelt out in other words, I will oblige.
You however, call me ‘adolescent’ (just what kind of insult is that supposed to be anyway?), you describe what I write as ‘drivel’ when it obviously is not (it may be wrong, but it isn’t drivel), and so forth. THAT is ad hominem. Just for record. But since this list seems so ‘in the family’, you appear not to notice.
Here’s a starter on that spelling out, since I’m here: you are de facto promoting unnecessary death, ‘blaming’ millions of people for a situation that is patently not of their (direct) causing, and telling them to ‘take up their bed and walk’ when the simply cannot without a certain type of help – which I appreciate may not be aid, it may even be good market conditions, but is still required before they can prosper. The essence of your pro-death stance is STILL embedded in your latest post, in which you complain that such a claim is so horrid. You say that ‘perhaps the fault is theirs’ and ‘people have to do this for themselves’. Do you have any knowledge of addiction? How, even if you can argue people become ‘addicted’ to whatever (say, in this case, aid…however much I disagree with that in point of fact), they STILL need, and if you are any kind of rights-based humanitarian, such as libertarians should be, and deserve help? When you have resources with which to help, deploying which does not seriously reduced your own welfare, no matter if you have helped countless times before, no matter if there is a risk that the help will again go astray, the moral case is that one should help – and this is the same for libertarians…unless, excuse me as I get boring now I know, you are ‘objectively in favour of masssive avoidable death’.
So, if it’s the word ‘genocide’ you baulk at, I will recast the argument as ‘objectively in favour of massive avoidable death’. Rather than wimp on about the moderators, which DOES seem adolescent, or claim I am breaking Samizdata netiquette, which I am patently not breaking, why not just answer the substantive point? Or is it all too Latinate for you?
To finish: Is it ad hom, Verity (it might be, in fact), if I ask that Chris Harper take over dealing with this? He seems to have a better wilingness to do the intellectual groundwork, rather than lash out at someone for merely being brave enough to venture into this den.
What you write, with such turgid intensity, is adolescent, posturing, leftist drivel.
This isn’t a company or a tag team, so I won’t be handing over the baton to Chris Harper at your foolish command. This is a blog. If Chris Harper wishes to post, he will do so regardless of your preferences.
Well that’s that then: all points about, ultimately, the relevance or not of the UN, the role of international online fora, and how to deal with avoidable disease, dismissed, with a staggeringly well-placed ‘adolescent, posturing, leftist, drivel’ charge. I will cherish your ‘turgid intensity’ jibe with affection.
Doesn’t do much for the credibility of libertarians or Samizdata, or their willingness to do serious debate, though: precisely how is one supposed to challenge you, without preemptively agreeing with you?
Apologies for interrupting!
Alright then John – some fair points made, so let’s have another crack. First of all my ‘credibility’ (or anyone else’s, though I don’t speak for them) is not at issue since, to be frank, I couldn’t care less what you think.
As for the substantive point…
“When you have resources with which to help, deploying which does not seriously reduce your own welfare, no matter if you have helped countless times before, no matter if there is a risk that the help will again go astray, the moral case is that one should help..”
I think perhaps there is the further consideration that helping may actually make things worse, chiefly by inculcating welfare culture still further. As dependency stifles entrepreneurship, the best means of preventing avoidable death is thus quashed – and our ‘help’ would simply be a contributing cause to this, indeed a crime of commission even! We may argue over the weight of this claim, but it is nontheless a claim that potentially reverses the direction of your moral case to being in favour of ‘massive avoidable death’.
But taking the point further, can we not say that because foreign aid simply reinforces the position of dictators and further inculcates welfare dependency, which in turn creates the conditions favourable to ‘mass avoidable death’ – is it not true that you yourself, with your ‘goodwill’ to the rest of the world are ‘objectively in favour of mass avoidable death’?
If it is a real argument you want, then there it is.
“A crime of commission”. Thank you, mike.
This is what the “international community” and the UN has been perpetrating on Africa for 50 years and impoverishing the richest continent on planet earth. They’ve got everything and can’t make a go of it?
I wonder why not? Because the hundreds of thousands of people, government organisations, suppliers of air tickets, hotel rooms, restaurants, phone calls, offices in hirises all over the world, computers and charities would be out of their comfortable salaries if the Africans were allowed to make a go of it themselves?
How about because it takes no effort to get a survival standard going in life, unless you are held back by those “speaking” for you? The UN survival industry is vast – huge – larger than most free enterprise industries. They are tax-sucking parasites on humans and must be stopped. Other tranzi parasites are the International Red Cross with a “humanitarian disaster” every week, Amnesty International with a “humanitarian outrage” every week and on and on.
Their lifeline is Africa’s blood.
Let the Africans find their own way, without “help” after 50 years – four generations. Let’s see what they can do. My confidence is in the human desire to acquire. Open up our markets, get the tranzis the hell out of the picture, and then let’s see what the energy of African entrepreneurship can do.
Nobody answered my question. John? Why is a JAM different from any other self-selected forum for people of like mind?
Guy: Apologies, I thought your point was rhetorical! I myself think you’re basically right (particularly so since you include this site!). The two limited benefits I foresee are a an educational experimentation with advanced multi-user virtual interaction, that is requires no blocking up of nice cities, no travel costs, and puts poorer people on a plane with richer people; and the simple fact of disenfranchised people talking about solutions, and, thereby, probably by NOT getting any good response from the UN system, getting a taste for being involved in governance debates, indeed in self-governance, and not being passive to the depredations and blithe arrogance of shite government.
One of the reasons I have pursued this thread, despite the irritating attempt of such as Verity to simply piss on what I am arguing – with turgid intensity or otherwise – is that I am more virulently anti-UN than most of you could possibly be: having actually worked there. But the first point is that I want to encourage you all to see the following:
– the stepping on point, being that the JAM is a UN thing not an IBM thing, predominantly;
– the JAM is not a physical meeting!
– that it is no more a single entity, the ‘UN’, than the U.S. is single operational or statutory entity (and that as such, your critiques need to be targeted much more surgically to get the traction they deserve);
– that the libertarian platform, if viewed more as a rights and responsibilities ticket, than a vague anti-gov pro-enterprise rallying call, invites a very serious question about how to deal with preventable mass death;
– that the pragmatic answer is something approaching intergovernmental co-operation.
On that basis, I would be interested – very genuinely – in what your proposed solution is. Verity’s solution is no solution at all, as far as I can see. Talking in very unspecific terms about 50 years of this and that, of dependency culture, of the failures of aid, is sloganising and does nothing for, say, Zimbabweans suffering under Mugabe.
Look, I have BEEN in those hotels, on those planes, at those meetings – and at one meeting, prior to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, where I was lead speaker I became so utterly sick of it I resolved to get out, and I did. You don’t need to lecture me on the UN ‘industry’.
But there are problems that are preventable, which require solutions more profound and yet less grandiose, than yet again (as per Verity’s latest post, which seems little more than the latest cycle of a record stuck in a groove/CD repeating its track) incanting ‘no governments! more entrepreneurship!’.
The aid/dependency argument is in principle a good one. It is however radically weakened by the fact of aid being managed by dictators, often maintained by overseas governments, further weakened by the low levels of pre-assessment and conditionality by donor governments, and further weakened by the fact that, in the case of aids, this is not a long-term state of affairs: it is something that has exploded on the scene in the last fifteen years, and is only partly connected to the overarching governance question.
Even if I was to accept – and I don’t, not completely – the ‘wasted aid leading to dependency argument’ leading to lack of entrepreneurship argument, the question still remains of what you do to stiimulate entrepreneurship and markets where these not only don’t exist, but people have precious little resources to do anything at all.
Verity’s oh-so-grand sounding ‘it takes no effort to get a survival standard going in life’, and ‘let Africans find their own way’, are, in my view, staggeringly empty and irresponsible phrases. If Verity in his/her own country cannot achieve a libertarian revolution, with all the liberal starting points and options in place, what on earth makes him/her think any kind of basic transformation can happen in Africa? Your wanton attack on ‘tranzis’ (hiding a really vague piece of analsys under a abbreviation with a cool ‘z’ in it), suggesting they are ‘sucking Africa’s blood’ may or not be true for the places where they are operating…but in most of Africa, indeed most of the developing world they aren’t present! What about Nepal? Have you ANY idea of the suffering of most of the people in the hills, who have no ‘UN’ or ‘tranzi’ interference of any kind? For no other reason than helping them create an ‘entpreneurial culture’, what would you do to help?
The list is vast: places where demonstrable suffering exists, where there is and indeed has never been ‘tranzi’ meddling, and where helping would not add costs, and might well create rapid benefits by incubating a trader partner.
What. Would. You. Do? Doing nothing is tantamount …well I have made the point repeatedly.
My underlying point here is that rooting oneself in ideological complacency is very comfortable, particularly if you feel free to misuse charges of ad hom when you don’t like an argument and feel ready to bandy personal dismissals before using analysis, but it doesn’t get to the heart of things. The libertarian platform I think needs to unpick firstly the potential of such things are the JAM (as I think Dave Tebbut was originally doing), and to consider the trick problem of how you actually create the conditions for free living, that you say you want, where the pre-conditions do not exist and cannot simply magic into existence and are not being held back by any ‘tranzi’ bloodsucking.
Why not actually debate this Verity? If you were really committed to low/no government high enterprise culture, you’d want to actually see things change, rather than be happy ranting on the same tack, and side-swiping intellectual critics as ‘adolescent’ and ‘turgidly intense’.
Samizdata is funny (as are other some libertarians I have debated with): you lash out at people criticising you, even if they are trying to find operational means for the very ideas you are proposing, simply because they point out the need to soften ideological rigour for the sake of some practial advance in the real world. In the extremely naff Social Responsibility Statement of this site, you talk about not having wheelchair ramps for the ‘intellectually challenged’. Well, the only intellectual wheelchairs I see are the ones some of you are riding around in.
And go on Verity surprise me: see if you can come up with something other than a) I am breaking the Samizdata code by going beyond clammy in-thinking, b) I am attacking you personally with ‘adolescent drivel’, c) removing governments and ‘tranzi’ bloodsucking will somehow magically allow entrepreneurialism to flourish, rapidly enough to save the hundreds of millions now HIV+, including the new born babies.
For someone who write lengthy wadges, dense thickets of posts, you seem curiously unable to read.
Obviously, I can speak for no one but myself, but I have said several times, unequivocally, that Africa’s problems are no concern of the West. Their problems are self-inflicted.
African countries were far, far wealthier than Asia when they were under colonial rule. Since independence, they have pissed their wealth away on “strong men”, backing the wrong side (the USSR) and sheer dependence. Asia has become rich and is getting richer with each ticking second. Fifty years after being handed the reins, Africa’s a basket case.
This is their own fault. Hundreds of billions in aid has been pour down their gaping throats and they are still a basket case. They’re not infants. They adult human beings. Time they looked for their own solutions without interference from UN jobsworths, you or anyone else.
As I have said several times, their mess is self-created and they will have to find their own way out. It is not a global problem. It’s their problem. They’re unimaginably rich in natural resources. Let them be adults and find their own solutions.
I would like to see the Africa industry dismantled and scrapped.
PS – Their HIV is not our problem either. We have spent hundreds of billions of pounds saving them from one health disaster after another. This can’t go on. People like you should stop interfering and infantalising them.
No, Verity, it’s not that an adolescent like me can’t read, it’s that you were, up until these last posts, equivocating on what you meant about Africa, blaming the ‘tranzis’ and their bloodsucking, and picking at me and my style. Rather than out and out blaming ‘Africa’, which you now have.
The point of wodges (my spelling of wadge) of dense adolscent text is to actually articulate a point, or rather a series of questions, and elicit a clear answer.
Which, to be fair, you have now provided. It’s not so much the tranzis’ as that of ‘Africa’ itself, so you seem to say. I don’t agree, and I think many ‘Africa’ is not a homogenous entity all in thrall to ‘big men’. But I think you have a strong, clear view, and I respect that. Thanks.
I think there’s at least clear, and rather fatuous, fault in the thinking (you say ‘they’re adults’…what about the HIV+ orphans?). But the point is, it seems: at some point, enough is enough. The mass death is ‘their’ own causing, in the long view, as you see it. And it’s a fair point.
Over and out from me.
The tranzis have infantalised Africa. They have kept them dependent. Their current plight, and the plight in which they have been stuck for 50 years, is their own fault for allowing themselves to be victimised and bled dry by their monstrous politicians. The Rumanians overthrew a vile dictator. So did the Filippinos (a third world people). But not one nation in the whole of black Africa has been motivated or brave enough to do the same.
And they are encouraged in their dependence by people whose livelihoods depend on it. The UN is the major source of this evil, but I also include organisations like the IRC and their “humanitarian disaster” of the week.
As to HIV, famine and plague do tend to embed themselves in quagmires.
The only thing I would do for Africa (and not because it would benefit Africa, but because the current situation is so unjust) is give them unfettered access to our markets. Give the entrepreneurial an opportunity to flourish, and they will do so. Self-help by the motivated is the name of the game.
What was that all about?! First the guy rants on about how lazy and pompous and wrong we are, then when he’s effectively told we don’t find his concerns interesting he complains about ad hominem attacks and the lack of substantive discussion, then when we give him a substantive argument he scuttles off back to wherever he came from having apparently lost the interest he had shown earlier – which interest Verity memorably described as ‘turgid intensity’. Vapid posturing, more like.
And was hurt because we didn’t respond to his lengthy arguments which we have heard before, and before, and before, and before …… These people always grab you by the throat and spout the same old same old under the impression that they are bringing new and fascinating points to the table.
Yawn-o-roo.
John,
Samizdata is funny (as are other some libertarians I have debated with): you lash out at people criticising you, even if they are trying to find operational means for the very ideas you are proposing, simply because they point out the need to soften ideological rigour for the sake of some practial advance in the real world.
This I think is a fair point. Though you’ll find not all of us do lash out at criticism, we could do with a bit more praxis and program.
Despite only indirect experience of transnational institutions, through friends and acquaintances who’ve worked for them, and wading through a lot of utterly pointless documents–have you seen the FAO’s publishing output?–I can be very anti-UN too. I usually get into trouble for reminding people it began as a means for projecting an American idealism onto the world.
Guy: The UN is shite, no question. Some of the most innocuous-looking bits are the worst, co-opting good intentions, blocking self-help and innovation, and committing benign fuck-ups all over the place. It’s just that ranting at the UN (e.g. that it has ‘infantilised Africa’…), without a targetted approach, makes the critic look silly and the UN look like a worthy cause. Perhaps like criticising ‘the U.S.’ in a generalised way does; something you lot seem to pick up on.
Mike and Verity: My intention, after pointing out the inconsistency of the comments on hear re. the JAM, was to root out a clear position on global problems, the example I chose being Africa’s HIV problem. After much ‘drivel’, and turgid intensity, I managed to get a clear stance from Verity that was something more than generic attacks on tranzis: this being that Africa is basically to ‘blame’ for its ‘own’ problems. The reason I want to leave this here is that, that position is one I quite considerably disagree with, but I see that it is valid in one sense, and is in any case unlikely to be uprooted by further discussion: we will end up spatting, and I prefer to agree to disagree.
What disappoints me about this site is that such as you two refuse to engage until pushed into doing so, and repeatedly try to knock down discussants with criques such as ‘ad hom’, ‘drivel!’, ‘adolescent’, ‘posturing’, all of which are evidently not the case with what I wrote (though turgid intensity may be close to the mark; but see below). Rather, I think you might like to look at the extent to which you yourselves are ‘posturing’, both in waving an ideological wand at the world and blaming ‘it’ or ‘them’ when the magic doesn’t seem to work, and in assuming that anyone who challenges your position fundamentally or operationally is an adolescent drivellist.
What I think I exposed, or at least intimated, was firstly was the extent to which there is a real question as to how to deal with global problems for which a cause or negative agent is not identifiable (which I believe the case in much of the developing world), which of course brings into play the theoretical question of any kind of inter-group co-ordination in a libertarian polity.
New? Far from it. I don’t claim it as such. But you seem to have got so inured to low-grade generic, yes, posturing that any embedded, self-arising difficulties for the libertarian platform get ignored. If you can’t see the extent to which I am myself motivated by libertarian principles, then you are, I am afraid, pretty dim. My worry is further that in jumping up and down to dismiss my input to your site as drivel, on an issue on which I have considerable experience, you are demonstrating the extent of your intention to ignore the theoretical difficulties, and operational challenges, of what you claim to believe.
The point of writing with such ‘turgid intensity’ is precisely that I can just ignore your charges of ‘drivel’ or whatever, because what I write so evidently is anything but (even if it is wrong, as it may be). I write in a way that is more or less analysable, and criticisable. I am trying to engage. These are huge questions. While you may ultimately be right in principle, I can believe it readily, even were a libertarian order to arise, you would have basically nothing to offer during its implementation: would you put a cheerleader on the basketball court?
And Mike, you f*ckwit, I am not ‘scuttling’ anywhere: you would have thought by the length of these posts that I am trying to take you, this site, and these questions seriously, even while I doubt that you are. Where I ‘came from’ is somewhere that is definitely trying to make a better go of putting libertatory ideas and ideals into actual practice than I imagine you are, and perhaps even also putting a great deal more thought into working out the essential ideas. I was not hurt by anything so far – who would come thin-skinned to Samizdata? – but I do find a ‘scuttling’ jibe to be out of order.
Another dense volume of oft-repeated observations the writer clearly believes are unique to him.
I can’t speak for the others, obviously, but the reason I don’t engage with you is, you’re boring. Everything you write, all your “insightful” little observations have been made one hundred squillion times before.
Your ideas are not libertarian. They are authoritarian. Who are you to decide what’s good for Africa? I mean, who. the. hell. are. you?
(Please don’t write back: “I’m someone who cares ….”. I just couldn’t stand it!)
Cripes, you really are on auto-pilot, aren’t you Verity? To you, anyone challenging you is some kind of identikit bogeyman who can be dispatched with theatrical flourishes of ‘boring’, ‘yawnaroo’, ‘drivel’, ‘adolescent’, etc etc.
First: Consider your ‘observations the writer clearly believes are unique to him’ against my ‘new? far from it. I don’t claim it as such.’ Doh! Then further consider your claim of my being ‘authoritarian’ against everything I have written above: do I anywhere claim to have a single solution regarding Africa, or anything else? Double doh!
My point (at least here) is simply to claim that you don’t have any solution either! (And, by implication to raise the point of wanton attacks on UN and tranzi stuff, when it seems that your platform, or at least a rights-responsibilities version of it, ultimately demands something similar.)
You are a really dodgy advert for libertarianism. Attempts (albeit rushed) at close argumentation over important points are deemed ‘turgid’ or whatever; while you simply rehearse your repertoire of haughty, unspecific slogans. Great. We are all much enlightened. I really thought Samizdata was going to live up to something, and realise I was wrong.
John,
My ‘scuttling’ remark came from my understanding that you were ‘over and out’. The term means to ‘run hurridly’ I don’t see what is especially offensive about it – I mean it’s not like I’m comparing you to an insect or anything.
As for the real content of your latest comment…
“…which of course brings into play the theoretical question of any kind of inter-group co-ordination in a libertarian polity.”
Well that’s just it – I don’t see that there need be any ‘theoretical question of inter-group coordination’. Take disaster relief for example – what more is needed than good communications between the leadership of each group to ensure they don’t step on each others’ toes? Am I being naive? Please explain…
“…you are demonstrating the extent of your intention to ignore the theoretical difficulties, and operational challenges, of what you claim to believe.”
How so? What I believe (I hesitate to speak on anyone else’s behalf) is the primacy of self-help and voluntary help by private individuals – the operational difficulty is largely just getting coercively obtained taxpayers money out of the equation.
“I write in a way that is more or less analysable, and criticisable. I am trying to engage.”
So I have analysed and criticised. So engage.